Fans’ FB status feeds will be ‘rainbow-fy’ in real-time, into a wacky video by a team of 15 staff at the ‘Rainbow Call Centre’.

The social media engagement campaign ran for two weeks after which fans can vote on their favourite video from the library on FB.

Fundamentally, same idea as Old Spice campaign. Real-time response campaign to catch the attention of users, particularly so in the age where Gen Z has duper uber short attention span. Really not rocket science, but why aren’t many companies recognising this?

First came across this internet balloon race campaign in 2008. And Orange is launching it again this year!

Brilliant idea to make use of internet ‘mileage’ as the basis of competition. In 2008, 40,000 players picked a balloon (shaped like one of the Orange tariff animals) and set them free, floating across over 1,500 websites that had signed on to become part of the digital journey across the web, clocking up a whopping 63 million online miles.

‘In an age of related links and contextualisation, it’s nice to fly over websites that have no relationship to each other, other than they’re part of an epic race across the internet.’ Benjamin Tomlinson, creative director at Poke.

And I just found out – my favourite 2 social media campaigns of all time – Old Spice and Orange Balloonacy, were both developed by the same creative director – Iain Tait.

Crowdsourcing is so important, we see even car-maker Toyota is doing it, with the help of both offline and online media.

“Toyota Motor Sales (TMS), U.S.A. is rolling out “Ideas for Good”, a new brand campaign centred on the connection between its innovative automotive technology and benefits to society in the non-automotive space. Members of the public are inspired by the advertising campaign to find new, non-automotive applications for five distinct Toyota technologies to ultimately benefit society…..

…..The public can learn about Toyota’s technologies and how to share their ideas at www.toyota.com/ideasforgood, with ideas submitted before February 28, 2011 to be evaluated by independent judges. Winners of the challenge have the opportunity to bring their ideas to life by participating in a design session.”

Reminds me of Dell’s IdeaStorm and MyStarbucksIdeas. As much as the idea of crowdsourcing began 2-3 years ago, many companies are only jumping onto the bandwagon recently. Would be encouraging to see more corporations recognizing the need and doing some meaningful crowdsourcing.

Cool! I’m always on the lookout for really out-of-the-box social media ideas to run an interesting and engaging campaign. This is one that has a refreshing take on using twitter profile pictures to piece together a jigsaw puzzle to win a prize.

Turning twitter into a virtual playground, with real engagement and no hard selling of products. Kudos!

To answer the brief of increasing viewership of Mad Men Season 3 from 2 to 3 million people, Deep Focus (AMC’ Tvs agency) spotted a fan (who is an illustrator) ‘mad menning’ herself on her blog, and hence hired her to be the creator for hundreds of avatarsof mad men fans.

Takeaways for all marketers:

“Know your audience, almost in the biblical sense,” advised Schafer. Understand who they are, what they do, what media they like and their hobbies.

Reverse engineer success. Understand how many good users you need to spread the word and create a successful social campaign based upon your knowledge of your audience, what the ideal user looks like.

Make it easy for your best users to bring others into the fold.

The Mad Men Yourself campaign has in fact been so successful that it is still running, and Schafer said they plan to use it as part of the campaign to promote season four as well.

Not long ago, think VS ran something similar as well. Submit a message or something and your picture + message get broadcast across the billboards in time square. Or was it some other retailer? Can’t really remember.

Well, the Mexican beer – Corona is joining in the fun. Here’s how it works: ”You “like” the Corona Light Facebook page. Once you do that, you get access to the Times Square app, which will let you upload a photo (at least 500×500) for use in a billboard the company will be running from November 8 to December 6.”